We set the pup tent up in my back yard and pretend like we’re camping out some place else.
Dave doesn’t go to Boy Scout camp with me, but wants to. I
want to camp out in Garret Mountain
Dave is so tall his feel make the back of the tent bulge, so
I make him turn around so that his feet poke out the flap, not cold or wet,
this time of year, still he complains saying, “This is stupid.”
And it is. We can’t make noise or set off the fireworks Dave
brought up from his basement and planned for the trip. One of my uncles or even
my grandmother pokes a head out the back window expecting us not to be here,
which I wouldn’t be if I could figure out a way to pack up everything up and
get it out of the yard before they found out.
I have big plans, like I had back in the third grade when I
stole my uncle’s money and stored it in a shoe box my grandfather made for my
mother just after the family moved into the big house after the war, plans then
for a giant tree house where I could bring my mother after I managed to buy her
out of the asylum where my grandfather, grandmother and uncles put her, burning
the drawings I made and even some of the money when my uncle found the money
missing and naturally figured I was the one who took it.
This time, I want to tell
Dave, I won’t get caught, no tree house, no box in the back of my closet with
the cash, no elaborate drawings I’ll need to burn to keep secret.
I keep the money the money in my pockets and my plans in my
head – only I can’t keep it secret from everybody, needing to tell Dave to see
if he want to come along with me when I go to California since he’s nearly as
unhappy at his home as I am in mine.
But I can’t get a word in with all his bitching about how
cold his toes feel sticking out the flap of the ten and how all he wants is a
new CB radio he can’t afford so he can talk to the truckers on the highway.
His mother brings his father home once a month so he can
sign over his veterans’ check, a ritual so predictable Dave makes a point of
not being home if he can help it, not running away like I do, just not being
there, hiding in the basement with the old paint cans and the stench of heating
oil with his little brother, Dennis, sneaking down to bring him fool scrounged
from the refrigerator, miraculously to reappear once his mother left to bring
his father back to the Veterans’ hospital, hidden away out of shame, neither of
us daring to stare too long into the fact of madness for fear we might go mad
as well (though Dennis tells me on the sly that sometimes Dave will sneak to
meet his father when his mother is absent, and to bring him cigarettes and
booze from the liquor store Dave’s mother forbids his father to have.)
Maybe that’s what connects us, his father and my mother, his
coming to camp out with me his perfect excuse this time although his mother
believes I steer him in a direction she does not approve of, he standing too
tall too often when in my company, the way I sometimes do with my uncles even
at the threat of being beaten, taking back a bit of the life she stole from him
on the excuse she cannot raise a family without his help, and so Dave or his
brother, cook, clean, do laundry and such, while she does nothing.
But Dave hates having his toes feel cold, preferring the
leftovers his brother snuck to the cellar to the chips I share in the tent, and
the illusion we are somewhere we could be but aren’t, and the constant check
from the house, and the voices calling to me, “Are you still there,” and me
saying back; “where else would I be,” when we all know where I might got if
only they check a little less often.
All Dave wants is a CB radio so he can hear the voices of
the truckers coming and going to and from New York on the almost fully open
highway a mile north of where we live, friends who are not really friends who
keep him company late at night when his mother stares at her new Sony TV the
veterans’ checks allowed her to buy.
He knows all the handles and all the handles know him,
voices as vague over his cheap walkie-talkie as the voices my mother hears in
the dead of night, all he want is to hear they clearly and have them hear him
clearly, too.
And all I want is for him to hear me and to join me, not for
an overnight indulgence in my back yard, but for a trip to a place where nobody
can find us, where neither of us has to worry when and if mother or father
comes home or is gone, or live with the constant scent of heating oil we both
get when hiding in the cellar.
“I have a plan,” I tell him, when darkness has fallen
finally filling the yard and my uncles or grandmother have shut off the back
porch light, leaving us with the illusion of nobody watching.
Dave wants to know what kind of plan, having heard so many
of my plans before, big and little plans, I come up with in the midst of night
when sleep escapes me, moving his legs suggesting that his toes really hurt,
when we linger on the edge of summer, and the chill outside is hardly a chill
at all, the kind of weather we might need a sheet for, not a blanket.
I whisper the word “California ,”
and he moans. I ask if he’ll come with me if I go.
He has heard some variation on this so many time before he
knows just what to say to bring me back to reality, saying we don’t have money
for a trip like that, reminding me the last time I tried and how I had only two
cents in my pockets when the Little Falls police picked me up and brought me
home.
“I got money,” I tell Dave.
“More than two cents, I hope.”
“I got a lot more than that,” I say, touching my pocket and
the roll of bills.
“You always say you have money when you don’t.”
“I always come up with it when I say I can get it. But this
time I already have it.”
“Show me.”
I ease the bundle of bills out of my pocket, as gentle with
it as I would a bird’s egg, and yet cannot help but squeeze, half believing it
might blow away with a sudden gust.
Dave’s long face goes green, shaded by the glow of the
bathroom light out the window at the back of the house through the wall of the
tent. He’s never see so many bills in one place, except may be at the bank when
his mother made the teller cash his father’s veteran’s check in small bills to
make the amount seem greater than it was.
“Are they all 20s?” he asks, his voice hushed, knowing as
well as I did I did not come up with the money honestly, and that at any moment
someone might come out the back of the house and snatch it back.
“Not all, but enough,” I tell him. “Enough to get us on the
road west. I’m sure we can come up with more once we’re on our way.”
Just where and from whom I can not say, assuming the road to
the coast is paved with gold and all we need to do is pick up nuggets as we go
along.
I’m not going to make the same mistake I made last time.
Older now, I realize that an asylum is not a jail, and I cannot bail my mother
out no matter how many veterans checks I collect, or how many wallets I slip
cash out of, and she, as made as she is will knot know where she is or who she
is with and will keep trying to end it all just as she does each time someone
gets her out.
We need to go where Dave’s radio voices go, out beyond the
boundaries of the city, taking the same long road to the same distant
destinations, following the dotted line on the service station road map that
says this road goes to that particular place, places I dream of nightly and all
we need to do is put on feet on that road and go west.
The bathroom light goes out. The glow that illuminates
Dave’s face fades, and he seems at that moment as distant and ghostly as the
voices of the truckers he follows on his walkie talkie.
We don’t talk much after that. The night grows around us, at
first silent as the all too familiar traffic along Crooks Avenue fades away,
and then it fills with more disturbing sounds we do not normally allow ourselves
to hear at other times, the movement in the branches of the cherry tree, the
wrestling of raccoons along its trunk, the chatter of crickets and other
voices, mysterious and unnervingly loud in their own right with the sense that
our being out in their world somehow alters their way of life.
Sleep escapes me; I put the bundle of bills back in my
pocket, like I might an egg, thinking that in the morning it might hatch into
something grand, grow wings, and left me into the air in a flight away from
here and the life I live.
Dave has no trouble sleeping, the sound of his snoring
filling the interior of the tent like a counter beat the those beyond us in the
night, comforting in its own right, creating a wall of sound against the
darkness we can hide behind until dawn arrives.
I don’t recall falling asleep; I just stir out of it with
the arrival of dawn. Dave is gone. The flap out of which his toes stuck is open
so I can see the yard, the fence, and a portion of my neighbor’s house. I think
Dave must have woken in the middle of the night, and window me to comfort him,
he panicked and fled for home. I see only the impression he’s left on the
blanket next to mine, like the trail of a snake, long, narrow, uncertain,
marking his slithering passage out, telling me with his absence that he does
not intend to share my dream and I will once again have to make the trek west
on the highway on my own.
When I feel for the egg in my pocket; it’s gone.
It is not in the blanket or in the grass outside, or
anywhere near the tent I demolish as a grope, the panicked image of my uncle
coming out in the middle of the night flashing in my head, finding it, taking
it away and waiting now in the kitchen for me to come in where he plans to
confront me.
Inside the dusty old kitchen, around the table littered with
half empty coffee cups and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, my uncles
sit, struggling more with the aftermath of sleep than any petty crime I might
have committed. The comment sourly about my night in the yard and how foolish I
am for being so uncomfortable when I have a perfectly good bed in my third
floor bedroom unoccupied.
Then, I think of Dave, and how he must have found the
buddle, and taken it to keep it safe. I can’t call him to ask. His mother’s
phone got shut off for lack of payment, and even when it works, his mother is always the one who answers, the
one who always asks what I want in a tone suggesting I am looking to get Dave
in trouble – again.
Dave and I sometimes talk through the walkie talkies we brought
in the cheap shop in downtown Paterson .
But the signal is so weak we can barely hear each other above the static and I
have to shout; this is not something I want to shot about and be overheard.
Still I try, and hear only static, if Dave made I reply, I
can’t even hear the ghost of it. So I
have to go down to his house. I just can’t escape until I’ve done all the
chores my uncles have assigned me, a few extra thrown in for their having let
me camp out in the yard.
Dave lives slightly more than a block from my house, down
Crooks and beyond Vernon, in an apartment above a jewelry store that once was
an A&P, next to a liquor store where Dave buys his father booze and we buy
cream sodas, and on a hot summer day, the smells of booze and the meat grinder
from the old A&P waft up into Dave’s apartment.
When I get to the door downstairs, I find it locked, a rare
occurrence, since the other tenant in the building, our former post man, lost
his key.
I ring Dave’s bell, and hear its ring at the window three
windows down from where I stand at the door. No feet respond, pounding down the
inside stairs the way they usually do. The place is quiet like the night was
quiet, still, yet not still, filled with secrets whispering back at me, I do
not understand. So ring the bell again, and again, get a void as a response.
I can’t imagine where he’s gone off to, or his mother, or
his little brother and sister, a sister too small to walk on her own. I go back
around the corner to Vernon where
Dave’s mother usually parks her beat up station wagon, Dave’s father bought
before his illness. The space is vacant except for the glittering of fresh oil
from its leaking engine.
I go home, taking refuge in my room, hovering over the
plastic walkie talkie into which I speak from time to time, calling out Dave’s
name into the airways nobody but me can hear.
Hours later, I hear Dave’s voice calling back, not full of
static, loud, potent, floating above all the other ghosts we sometimes hear
when the truckers pass by.
I call back. He speaks again, not to me, to the ghosts, who
in turn can now hear him and speak back, finally about to reach him in his
brand new CB radio.
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